The Picture Gallery holds regular exhibitions and hosts events including talks, 'in conversation' discussions with artists, and concerts.
This exhibition will explore how artists used coloured paper surfaces to give their drawings more spatial depth: from preparing their papers with pastel-coloured chalk grounds, as described in Cennino Ceninni’s famous artists’ handbook, to the readily produced blue paper (carta azzurra), made famous by artists in Venice.
Large circular images – called tondi (singular tondo) from the Italian rotondo ( = round) – had become popular in fifteenth-century Florence. The Picture Gallery has three large tondi by artists working in Florence: Raffaello Botticini (1477-1520), Raffaellino del Garbo (1466-1524) and by an Imitator of Lorenzo di Credi (c. 1458-1537). They will all be on show together for the first time.
The Christ Church Sibyls, two paintings each showing five sibyls (sibyl = female prophet) have intrigued scholars and visitors alike. They were created by two of the most ingenious artists of the Florentine Renaissance: Sandro Botticelli and Filippino Lippi.
Visualising their artistic friendship and collaboration this exhibition will look underneath the painted surface and reveal the underdrawings and design processes of these fascinating panels. The show will also include some of the most outstanding Florentine drawings of the time, among them two newly-attributed works by Botticelli, figure studies by Filippino, but also sheets from rivalling workshops and their artists – like Verrocchio, Leonardo, Lorenzo di Credi and many more: a feast of Florentine Renaissance drawings, all taken from our own collection.
Recent exhibitions at the Christ Church Picture Gallery
The combination of image and writing is an evocative visual tool, found in medieval book illuminations, contemporary art and in the everyday of advertisement. This exhibition will explore some forms of this pleasing aesthetic, with drawings by Michelangelo, Leonardo, Veronese, Rosso Fiorentino and many more.
One associates drawings with monochrome lines on paper. However, seduced by colour, artists started experimenting with pigments in their sketches and designs. This exhibition brings together works from Christ Church’s permanent collection to explore how the masters of the Renaissance and the Baroque incorporated colour into the medium of drawing.
Postcards are equally ephemeral as they are collectable. Recently they have been recognised as fruitful objects for academic research, be it as photographic images or records of social interaction and change. This display of over 70 postcards focuses on images of Christ Church – many of them mailed between 1899 and 1953.
Creating the illusion of space on a flat (two-dimensional) surface requires the understanding and mastery of a number of techniques, one of which is foreshortening – in which shapes are compressed and overlapped to mimic what the eye sees. This exhibition will show how artists of the Renaissance and the Baroque explored the technique in their drawings.
Robert Nanteuil (1623–1678) was the most influential and innovative engraver in the seventeenth century, immortalising the court and officials of Louis XIV in France. This display explores twelve of his engraved portraits, interrogating the faces of the corridors of power. The prints are from the collection of Dean Henry Aldrich (1648–1710), and also show the fascination that an English audience had for these works.
The landscape as an independent, image-worthy subject appeared late in Western Art and its beginnings lie in the more private medium of drawing. This exhibition will showcase how artists of the Renaissance and Baroque developed and then fuelled an interest in the subject of nature: from the Venetian artist Domenico Campagnola's (1500–1564) idyllic landscapes of a romantic rural life to the French master Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), whose name became synonymous with landscape painting.
The story of the birth of Jesus has become one of the most depicted subjects in Western Art and these images are still influencing how we see Christmas today. To celebrate the season, Christ Church Picture Gallery will show a selection of drawings from its permanent collection exploring the motifs – from the Nativity to the Flight to Egypt – and their enduring impact.
To introduce Christ Church's new acquisition – a portrait of the poet and college alumnus Wystan Hugh Auden – we assembled a selection of his likenesses in a special display.
Raphael’s (1483–1520) artistic fame never died and the medium of print helped to spread it, while also satisfying the demand to own the master’s ideas and designs. At the centre of this exhibition will be prints from the collection of Henry Aldrich (1648–1710) whose fascination with Raphael went far beyond collecting the artist’s designs to using them for his own creative output.
When the Picture Gallery had to close in March 2020 the exhibition on show – Drawing in Ink – was cut short. In order to give our visitors the chance to see the show and to explore the medium of pen and ink during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, we chose to bring it back.
Christ Church students celebrated Arts Week in February with a number of events, shows and performances. Kumeri Bandara created three paintings inspired by her heritage for this occasion. Bandara’s paintings celebrate queer Sri Lankan women and make reference to the Sigiri frescoes and Nayomi Munaweera’s novels, Island of a Thousand Mirrors and What Lies Between Us. With her paintings, she aims to highlight issues of decolonisation and representation of queer cultures within the settings of a collection of Italian Old Masters.
Before Covid-19 I was preparing an exhibition (Inside Out) of works by Lucy Jones, to be opened at the Picture Gallery this summer. It was a wonderful and hugely enjoyable project and I am indebted to Karen Demuth, who introduced me to Lucy and her work.
I was excited to present Lucy Jones’ work in the Picture Gallery, but, sadly, we had to stop the preparations during the ongoing pandemic and realised that pushing back the exhibition dates by a couple of months would be unrealistic. We, therefore, decided to postpone the show for a year. In the meantime, in a way of an introduction to our visitors, we asked Lucy to send us a video from her studio. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as we do and that you will join us in the gallery again in 2021 to see and experience the real thing.
Jacqueline Thalmann (Curator of the Picture Gallery)
September 2020
The North-Italian city of Parma is home to one of the oldest universities in the world and is a renowned culinary centre. Its artistic school, however, remained provincial until it entered the European stage in the sixteenth century with two major artists: Correggio (1489-1534) and Parmigianino (1503-1540). They defined the ‘Parma School’ with its airy and sensuous style that also has a melancholic and foreboding quality. This dramatic duality became the precursor for the Baroque – a style that swept through Europe in the seventeenth century.
The exhibition will show 35 works from Christ Church’s own collection by artists from this school, including works by Correggio, Parmigianino, Anselmi, Bertoia and Orsi.
The majority of Old Master drawings were stages in artistic processes, which usually led to an artwork in a more durable medium. In some rare cases the drawings showed marks and traces of these processes. All the drawings on display had such marks and the exhibition explored their meaning, while connecting the artistic creativity with the physicality of the making procedures. Included in the show were such famous works as Perugino's Head for Joseph of Arimathaea, Domenichino's monumental putto and Vasari's Procession of Pope Leo X, but deliberately also lesser-known works, like Simon Vouet's off-sets of a Madonna and an adoring angel and Elisabetta Sirani's Saint Preaching from a Window.
The Metropolitan Museum in New York carried out crucial conservation work on one of the Gallery's Michelangelo drawings in 2017. This display showed how and why this was done while exhibiting the drawing for the first time after its return.
Rome attracted artists for centuries. From the late 1400s, European artists drew inspiration from the grand sculptures and architecture of antiquity. Many young artists travelled to Rome to study and sketch the city's classical ruins. Another lure was the financial and political power of the Pope and his cardinals and the artistic opportunities this offered. Artists like Raphael and Michelangelo had created masterpieces in the city, adding to Rome’s reputation. The Catholic Church’s astute understanding of the power of the image was the driving force behind Rome’s rise as an artistic centre, culminating in the sensuousness of the Roman Baroque. This exhibition illustrated, with over thirty drawings, the different artistic forces and personalities which were part of this highly creative and at times volatile arena.
Among the visual material in Christ Church are a number of caricatures and satires, not enough to show the full development of the genre, but interesting ‘scraps’ which gave a glimpse into the beginning of caricature and satire in Italy and how it was taken up and thrived in Britain.
It is a myth that museum storerooms are filled with treasures, but they often contain many portraits of the unknown, unloved and less fashionable. This display shed some light on these forgotten faces.
The charm of animals predates the cat video and they have been subject of many old master drawings. From observation, artists rendered lions, horses, dogs and many more and created imaginary beasts from descriptions. Over thirty drawings with a variety of approaches were on show, culminating in an in-focus display of our two drawings by the pioneering British animal artist Francis Barlow (c. 1624-1704).
Drawing with red chalk was a technique emerging in the early 16th century. With over thirty drawings – from Michelangelo to Bernini – the exhibition explored the sensuousness of drawing in red.
An Oxford history tutor depicted Oxford.
Many portraits, especially female portraits, were changed from representing an individual to a generic figure, usually a saint. This exhibition explored three of these altered works from the Picture Gallery's own collection.
Depicting the ordinary, the 'everyday' in art is a modern concept. Art's role, one could argue, is to show the extra-ordinary, the otherworldliness. It is there to elevate rather than just observe, but, especially since the 16th century, artists started to depict the world around them. We should not believe that this is pure, unaltered reality. It is artistic interpretation making the day-to-day image-worthy.
Filippino Lippi's painting The Wounded Centaur is one of the highlights in Christ Church Picture Gallery. The back of that painting shows an unfinished drawing of the Triumph of Love (?) and was displayed to the public for the first time. It was at the centre of this show.
The Picture Gallery opened an exhibition of new works by Christ Church's fine arts students. The works were installed throughout the gallery.
2015 marked 250 years since General John Guise bequeathed his collection of over 200 paintings and almost 2000 drawings to Christ Church. In addition to our exhibition Undisputed Masterpieces (3 June – 5 October 2015), we celebrated the anniversary in an exciting collaborative format: an installation of 250 cards displayed in the Picture Gallery. Many joined in this project and had their thoughts displayed in the Picture Gallery.
Blank cards were sent to members of the Christ Church community – to artists, scholars, students, and others – with the request that they write down their thoughts about why art matters, why we should celebrate art benefactors like Guise, and why those who preserve, research, present, and create art still matter today. We installed these cards in the Picture Gallery, one for each year since the Guise bequest.
While the Ashmolean museum showed its breath-taking exhibition of Venetian drawings this autumn, the Picture Gallery looked at another aspect of Venice's creative output – printing – 'the' medium for spreading ideas and thought.
An exploration of a rare and unknown panorama of Venice from the late 16th century. This painting had not been on display in the Picture Gallery for the last twenty years, but after a fresh restoration the public was able to explore this rare panorama up close.
In 1765 General John Guise, a soldier and art collector, died. His wife and son had pre-deceased him and so he decided to leave his art collection to his former Oxford college, Christ Church. This extraordinary bequest celebrated its 250th anniversary in 2015. While the whole Picture Gallery is testimony to his benefaction, this exhibition drew renewed attention to his collection of drawings. They included some of the most important Old Master drawings in this country, with sheets by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Bellini, Titian and many more.
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, better known as Raphael was one of the most celebrated and influential artists. Despite his early death in 1520, at the age of only 37, his pupils and followers continued to develop their master’s tradition – the two best known are probably Giulio Romano and Marcantonio Raimondi. Their designs for prints, silver and gold vessels, paintings and tapestries dominated the artistic language of the time. This exhibition gave a glimpse into that splendour.
One of the most powerful men in England during the reign of Henry VIII, and yet there are hardly any contemporary portraits of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1473-1530). The most frequently used likeness was painted posthumously and is housed in Christ Church Hall. For the first time, it was taken down from the heights in which it usually hangs, and visitors got close to it and looked Thomas Wolsey in the eye. Wolsey's original cardinal's hat was also on display.
This small display answered some often-asked questions by our visitors about inscriptions, numbers, stamps and borders on drawings. This visible history left on the paper preoccupies curators and art historians, but the detail of it can become boring to the uninitiated. In a smaller dose, however, it has the making of a detective story. These signs provide important clues in solving the mystery of how these fragile objects - sometimes just snippets of paper - have survived for so many centuries. It also shows how collectors looked after their precious objects, by pasting them on sheets of paper or sticking them in albums and marking them against theft.
This ‘archaeology of drawings’ also included wine and grease stains (Jacone/Carracci) and colour splashes (Tintoretto) left by the artists themselves, but this did not deter collectors from prizing them very highly. Inscriptions placed on the sheets must also be distinguished and handwritings compared. Artist’s names are usually not signatures by the artists themselves, but added later by a different hand. Old Master drawings are hardly ever signed, often they were part of the working process and destined to remain in the workshop. They were not regarded as stand-alone works of art. But as soon as they became highly coveted collectables in the 16th century, they were inscribed by art dealers and collectors, to proudly mark them as being by a distinguished master. In some cases the artist’s names added were wishful thinking rather than actual fact and sometimes these inscriptions were deliberately fraudulent. By tracing back the signs which were left on Old Master drawings and following these markings - elaborate gilded borders, simple pen and ink lines, inscriptions and specially designed stamps – one can reveal the people behind these collections, from artists like Giorgio Vasari and Sir Peter Lely to clergymen, dealers, expert connoisseurs and librarians and they also allow one to establish the authenticity of a work.
How does one depict Venus, the goddess of love? What does Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, look like or Diana, the goddess of the hunt? How do these divine figures relate to the appearance of mortal females? These are questions which lead artists to create faultless faces and appearances and to invent an ideal beauty in the taste of their time. This is not gender specific – male as well as female ideals were pursued, but male models from which to study and then ultimately create an ideal body or face were usually more easily available. Proportion studies, for example, were mainly calculated with male figures in mind. A female proportion study from the 16th century by the Italian artist Talpino is the only one of its kind and was included in the exhibition. Prints by the German master Albrecht Dürer show his idea of the ideal female form. It differs from that of Talpino, but it is also based on detailed proportion studies, e.g. the figure of Venus in The Dream of the Idler, or the personification of Luck. An engraving of four witches, also by Dürer, was displayed next to drawings of the three Graces by Guercino and an English artist, Charles Beale the Younger, who looks almost too closely at the female anatomy. Other drawings included mythological figures of Venus, Diana, Minerva and Hebe, the goddess of youth. A number of idealised female faces showed the variety of the subject and the inventiveness of the artists and concluded with the self-portrait of the Bolognese artist Elisabetta Sirani, in which individual and idealised features merge.
Sean Scully (born 1945 in Dublin) has been described as the ‘greatest living abstract painter’. He is best known for his monumental oil paintings, but his watercolours, prints and photographs—though less known—are equally powerful and significant.
Scully abandoned figurative work in the 1960s and has since developed an iconic visual language of strips and blocks. He has explored these forms in a variety of combinations, rhythms, colours and media, and the resulting range is breathtaking. His work is represented in major museums around the world and is regularly displayed internationally in solo exhibitions.
In this, his first exhibition in Oxford, eleven paintings and thirty-three prints by Scully will be on view. The physical power and materiality of his works will be in direct dialogue with the masterpieces of the 16th century from the Christ Church collection: Annibale Carracci’s Butcher’s Shop will be inches away from Scully’s Dark Wall, Jacopo Bassano’s Christ Crowned with Thorns in close proximity to Scully’s Abend, and Scully’s Yellow Robe Red Figure will speak to Jacopo Bertoia’s Mars, Hercules, Bacchus, and Jupiter.
Like Dürer, Rembrandt and Goya, Scully’s prints developed in parallel to his painterly work. Among his prints on display will be Heart of Darkness, Ten Towers, Desire, and Narcissus.
The exhibition was curated by Jacqueline Thalmann and Kelly Grovier with the full support of Sean Scully and his New York studio, as well as with the generous help of Timothy Taylor Gallery. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
Sean Scully and Kelly Grovier will be in Conversation in the Blue Boar Lecture Theatre at Christ Church, Oxford, on the 30 May 2014 at 5.00pm.